Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Winter Deaths and Economic Myopia

A headline
from ‘Metro’ 22nd November 2013 reads: “How winter kills more people
in Britain than in -30C Sweden” and “There were 25,535 ‘excess winter deaths’ –
people who died as a direct result of the cold – in Britain in 2011-12 compared
with 3,385 in Sweden, it was claimed.” Once
we take into account the differing population sizes the excess winter deaths
accounted for 4.61% of all fatalities in Britain
compared to 3.76% in Sweden.

Sweden suffers far more from what is
designated as ‘severe’ weather than does Britain. It has up to 120 days per
year of snow lying on the ground (in London it is less than 5) and the
temperature can fall to as low as minus 53 degrees Celsius.In the UK the lowest temperature ever recorded was minus 27 degrees
Celsius.

In 2012-13
the number of people who died due to the freezing conditions rose to 31,100.
Most of those unnecessary fatalities were over 75 years of age (82%) and most
of those fatalities were women.

It isn’t
just energy inefficiency or sub standard accommodation that is at issue here.
The attitude in Britain
is that energy companies are entitled to make a profit even when, as monopolies,
they enjoy protection from competition.This state protectionism encourages contempt for the consumer and
creates an abusive relationship with the public.

Government exploits
the poor and the middle classes through its policies and then is coerced by
fear of instability to subsidise the marginalised consumer.

People are unable
to borrow from banks to purchase property and rents are too high for most
workers.This creates a situation in
which government has to intervene to subsidise housing.The banks profit from a subsidised property
market.The banks enter into a minimum risk
relationship with the state to subsidise rental housing and keeps the price of
home ownership artificially inflated. The rental market profits the banks that
provide the loans to the well off to purchase their rental portfolio while the
government controls the spigot of funds available for that housing.The poor then have to be housed in rental
accommodation they will never be able to afford to buy.

Many people
have insufficient funds to keep their homes warm in the winter time. Remember
that statistic. The old people don’t
complain, they just die - 31,100 people died from cold – the number of people
who suffer in the winter (but survive) will be many times greater.

In Britain
de-nationalisation was supposed to create competition and efficiency but the
imperious attitude plaguing the larger corporations instead protects the
economic behemoth.Banking and Energy
are the twin establishment beasts. We want to keep Britain ‘British’ at least in terms
of our economic independence but true competition would open up the market
place to hundreds of banks and dozens of energy companies. This would
reduce costs and yes, it would save lives.Energy companies would have to reduce their prices and take risks to
survive. In Britain
today they have no need to do either.

The ‘big six energy suppliers’ refers to Britain's
largest energy companies.According to
Wikipedia they supply gas and electricity to over 50 million homes and
businesses in the UK
and they control 96% of the energy
market. Similarly, the retail and commercial banking markets are dominated by only
five banks.

Economic and
financial resilience is the key to weathering any downturn in the economy.But the protected juggernauts have no
incentive to keep the cost to consumers low or to take any risks with their low
value consumer customers and if the government bails them out in the bad times
it encourages their recklessness in their high value commercial transactions.It is the reason that the global financial
crisis which has now been running since late 2008 has not touched the energy
company’s profits and why the banks in Britain
were able to weather the storm – they retain their centrality to Britain’s
economy as the government fights to protect them from European interference.

Better policy
making by the government (any government) would deliver a strong economy
without being reliant on high unemployment, cheap foreign labor and high
government protectionism. But an economy that has so many monopolies must
create movement of senior personnel between those monopolies but no advantage
to those people that utilize their activities.If that distorts the economic model then social policy is created to
prevent frustration from spilling over into violence and disorder. That social
policy can only be financed effectively if the government has sufficient revenues
to fund it.With an economy that is so
besotted with central control that situation can only become less stable as
more people become dependent on government assistance.

The State is
influenced in its guiding principles by obsessive regulation of society which
is expressed through paternalistic policies offering short term solutions to ameliorate
but never solve any of the problems afflicting the economy. This paternalism has constructed a fool’s
paradise in which ‘anything goes and anything is possible’ or at least that is
what society, through the media, instructs us to believe.But then the reality is something entirely
different. It is this contradiction that is creating much of society’s stresses
and it is also the reason that nine million Britons, (that is fifteen percent
of us) has a criminal record.

We are
psychologically conditioned to respond to stress reactions but the purpose of
that reaction is survival. We aim to return our situation to a manageable level.
If we are unable to exercise effective control in our lives we become stressed.
So, on the one hand we encourage unrealistic expectations and then we are
dumbfounded by the panoply of medical conditions that appear to be increasing in
complexity even as our medical knowledge and sophistication expands
exponentially.

The unspoken
question that no-one is asking is how we prevent our society from creating
enormous pockets of inequality, of deprivation and violence?

And that brings
me to my final economic issue.

Mark Zuckerberg
believes (FP Magazine December 2013) that “the story of the next century is the
transition from an industrial, resource-based economy to a knowledge economy”
but that smacks of a “let them eat cake” mentality.It makes assumptions which are unsustainable
without recourse to negative eugenics programs or an apocalyptic vision of
death camps in our ‘green and pleasant land’.

It isn’t bureaucracy
that keeps unemployment and poverty doggedly high but the attitude of
politicians and business leaders that people can adapt to anything.

A member of the
British governing classes very recently stated that fifteen per cent of Briton’s
have an IQ that is less than 85. OK then, what are this fifteen percent going
to do in the knowledge economy?They
won’t become doctors or nurses and they won’t be able to compete with cheaper
immigrant labor.

The politicians
tell us all to buckle under. They tell us immigration is good for Britain. But
they don’t have to compete for jobs. I have a friend who is a master tradesman.
He was unemployable because he did not speak Polish.I am not anti-immigrant. I am ‘anti’ the
idiots in government who think that the not so smart and the not so ruthless
don’t matter. I am anti the politicians on all sides of the house that dismiss the
‘expensive’ tradesman who has spent most of his (or her) life perfecting his
(or her) art because they assume they cannot always find a solution to the
problems they created. And I am anti the educators and their bureaucratic henchmen
who insist that people are machines to be engineered.

In the 21st
Century, in the giddy rush to progress no-one, no group, no party has a vision
for the future that has people, all people, at its centre.In a world obsessed with the rights of the individual
we have raised the individual as a group identity onto a lofty peak, as gods, while
we ignore the individual as if they are worthless because as individuals they
distract us from the ideal.

In the 21st
Century no one should freeze to death, or live in fear of the cold. Government
has condemned too many to suffering and too many to permanent insecurity.We possess today a model for a society that
drives the expectations of the many for a consumerist heaven that does no more
than to enrich the coffers of the state and to betray the long term interests
of the people.